Dima Srouji's "Ghosts."

By Imogen Lee

As recreations of uprooted artefacts, Dima Srouji’s collection ‘Ghosts’ (2020, fig. 1) grapples with the displacement of the Palestinian people and their tangible and intangible heritage. Based on existing archaeological artefacts held by Western institutions (such as the V&A and the Met), these works were made in collaboration with specialist Palestinian glassblowers in Jaba.

Figure 1: Dima Srouji, Ghosts, hand-blown glass, 2019.

Simultaneously ancient and contemporary, the organic curving lines of the vessels appear almost fantastical. The reflection of light on them, highlighted in photographs from their exhibition (fig. 2), further activates the qualities of the glass, casting shadows and brightness to create a ghostly effect. Displayed alongside photographs of the original artefact, this curational choice also affirms their identities as ‘ghosts.’ Moreover, presenting her research on each object’s provenance, uses and status, Srouji works against the decontextualising “museum effect” - a way of seeing Svetlana Alpers identified as the “tendency to isolate something from its world, to offer it up for attentive looking” as an art object, thereby emphasising ‘visual distinction’ over cultural significance. Indeed, Srouji reinscribes these objects with their meanings within the Palestinian home. Through exhibiting this collection in the Levant, Srouji practices a “form of restitution” by which displaced objects are in some ways returned, while their absence is visualised in the translucency of the material.

Figure 2: Dima Srouji, Ghosts, 2019. View from exhibition.

Encapsulated in this collection, Srouji’s artistic and scholarly work is frequently concerned with the complex strata of subterranean Palestine, and the violent colonial mechanisms of extraction. Srouji articulates of the ground that “there are thousands of years of embedded memories of trauma and celebration in its layered soil.” As a locus of ‘biblical archaeology’ (a field dedicated towards finding evidence of the bible in the Israelite layer and discarding the rest), Palestine has become “one of the most excavated places in the world.” Following Harvard University’s1908-1910 excavations in Sabastiya, American, British and Israeli ventures funded by Zionists have weaponised archaeology as a legitimating tool for the settler colonial national project of Israel. Srouji describes how these projects “excavated this ground, removed objects from its gut and piled the rubble back into the voids they had created. The wounds echo in the subterranean strata where now stones speak to each other. Perhaps the ground wonders where its parts were taken to, or how to refill its hollow forms.” This evocative personification of the land conveys the sense absence and loss in the ‘voids’ and ‘hollow forms’ left by extraction and understands the earth as something that has been wounded by over a century of abuse. In the Ghosts collection, Srouji represents these exhumed artefacts that have been “scattered all over the world as a network of displaced forms,” suggesting that they signify a “glossary of fragmented histories, a broken archive, and a mark of imperial presence.”

Although historically situated, Srouji’s understanding of archaeological ground is attentive to the present. Troubling practices that would be considered unacceptable anywhere else are the norm within Israeli archaeology – including deliberate filtering to erase Palestinian history; the aggressive presence of armed Israeli soldiers at sites; the looting of Palestinian artefacts in the middle of the night by the IDF; state-sanctioned acts of ecological terrorism surrounding sites including settlers intentionally setting fire to Palestinian fields. Ancient sites and the excavation of artefacts continue the violent and surreal nature of Palestinian life under occupation, and apartheid, and now genocide; archaeological sites, often through designation as ‘Israeli National Parks,’ have played a critical role in enabling Israel to conduct perpetual land grabs and dispossess residents from their land. The deep imbrication of the archaeological field with the settler-colonial state is expressed in the militarised Archaeological Department of the Civil Administration (ADCA) which is funded by Israel’s Ministry of Defence. Therefore, the glass vessels Srouji creates take on new resonances given the contentious status of historic artefacts, and their inextricability from Palestinian experiences of oppression. Srouji’s incorporation of research in her artistic practice highlights its importance as a methodology for Palestinian resistance and decolonisation, by recovering knowledge that the Israeli regime actively supresses and conveying a history they deny exists.

While the archaeological endeavours, which began a century ago, inherently sought to erase histories beyond the Zionist narrative; these historic places have been sites of extreme violence against Palestinians over the past 75 years. Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza since October 2023 has involved an escalation in the systematic destruction of Palestine’s cultural heritage. In addition to targeting vital infrastructure and civilian institutions (including massacring displaced people in refugee camps, in schools where people were sheltering and bombing every hospital in the Gaza strip), Israel has repeatedly targeted the ancient and important sites: through satellite images, UNESCO has listed 102 historic sites (as of 8 April 2025) that have been destroyed. Proceeding the current crisis in Gaza, Srouji’s Ghosts nonetheless evoke the hundreds of thousands of objects now buried under rubble at these sites and decimated remains of historic collections. The breakability of glass seems to signal the fragility of this heritage under attack; its translucence – especially evident when shown against a white wall – warning of the risk of disappearance.

Figure 3: Dima Srouji, Detail from Ghosts, 2019.

Finally, Srouji draws on the ancient tradition of glassblowing embedded in the region. Roman historians describe what is now known as the Belus River in magical terms, with water flowing in and glass flowing out the other side. Representative of the broader treatment of the Palestinian land and people, this spiritual river is now dangerously polluted due to a weapons factory where the missiles used against Gaza and Lebanon are manufactured. Srouji’s research highlights the historic use of this river by women, and its role in bathing, cleansing and healing rituals. Consequently, Srouji argues that “the relationship of where glass comes from, the sand itself, to the glass use afterwards is incredibly linked to the Palestinian body and to the Palestinian land.” Following this analysis, it is possible to interpret the forms of Ghosts here in relation to the Palestinian people, the return of the sculptures as speaking to the return of forcibly displaced diaspora. The vessels represented in Ghosts include ones which carried rosewater for healing and purification, calling back Srouji’s framing of glass at the centre of a matrix with the river, sand, and body. The production of glass, made from sand itself in furnaces made from mudbrick on the mineral-rich banks of the river, is tied to the earth and, through this, Ghosts corresponds to ‘a central dialectic that defines contemporary Palestinian identity, the oscillation between rootedness and displacement.’(Ankori)  The flowing, twisting shapes of Ghosts – especially along the handles (fig. 3) – indexically hint at this river or the melting sand, while the central subject is their estrangement from this land. Essentially, Srouji’s use of glass as a medium explores connection to heritage, artisanal knowledge, and the land.

Figure 4: Dima Srouji, Detail from Ghosts, 2019.

As the live-streamed genocide against two million Palestinians continues to unfold, with Israel committing countless war crimes with seeming impunity from the UK and US governments, Srouji’s work raises vital and urgent concerns. Presenting these ‘ghosts’ of artefacts that were excavated from the ground, sorted and displaced to then be displayed in the West, Srouji reminds us that the extraction of heritage, the filtering and destruction of it is intrinsic to colonialism. Violent actions of displacement are not recent or inadvertent developments, but the oppression of Palestinian life and culture is at core of Zionism and has characterised the past 75 years. Srouji’s intertwined research and artistic practice foregrounds the role of archaeology in creating and perpetuating the Zionist entity, and questions what heritage means for people subject to relentless campaigns of ethnic cleansing.

Bibliography:

Srouji, Dima. “A Century of Subterranean Abuse in Sabastiya: The Archaeological Site as a Field of Urban Struggle” Jerusalem Quarterly 90 (Summer 2022): 58-74.

Srouji, Dima. “Ghosts, Amman Design Week. Curated by Noura al Sayeh, 2019,” accessed 14/04/25 at https://www.dimasrouji.com/ghosts.

Srouji, Dima. “Histories of Glass: Dima Srouji and the Belus River.” GEEX: Glass Education Exchange. Posted 08/04/25. Video, 5min. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bik_-Ifassw

Srouji, Dima. “Vignettes of subterranean Palestine.” The Avery Review, 56 (2022):1-12.

Ankori, Gannit. “Disorientalisms’: Displaced Bodies/ Embodied Displacements in Contemporary Palestinian Art.” In Uprootings/ Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration, edited by Sarah Ahmed, Claudia Castañeda, Anne-Marie Fortier and Mimi Sheller. Berg, 2003.

Taha, Hamdan. “Destruction of Cultural Heritage in Gaza,” Jerusalem Quarterly 97 (Spring 2024): 45-70.

Unesco. “Gaza Strip: Damage Assessement.” Last updated 09/04/25. Accessed 17/04/25 at https://www.unesco.org/en/gaza/assessment.